1. Field of Invention
The present invention relates to the field of life insurance, and more particularly to a method and insurance platform for whole life insurance combined with an investment at autonomous interest rates created by using the information technology.
2. Related Art
The whole life insurance can be regarded as a death insurance, i.e., a permanent death insurance of an insurant. In other words, the whole life insurance is a term death insurance, in which the insurance period does not expire until the insurant dies. Therefore, the whole life insurance is comparatively applicable to insurants having heavy family responsibilities and groups reserving retirement pensions.
However, the guarantee value of the whole life insurance is higher than the cash value only in the first few years of the initial insurance. That is, if no accident happens to the customer in the insurance period, the savings benefit is very low. Moreover, the information about the investment of the insurance company is not open, so the insured can neither know the profit nor decide the profit. Such an insurance product structure is very unfair to consumers. The insurance company makes large profit based on information asymmetry even to the extent of making a fortune out of the ignorance of the consumers.
Generally speaking, for the insurance company, the whole life insurance enables the insurance company to earn a great benefit from the funds operation under interest rate spread risks; for the customers, the whole life insurance completely lacks the benefit of savings. Therefore, it has become an urgent task for the insurance industry to solve to reflect the characteristics of information efficiency of the network technology, to establish an insurance platform, and to increase the customer's benefit of savings.
In recent years, with the development of the network technology, the information largely inclines towards consumers. The conventional whole life insurance product cannot satisfy the consumers any more. The consumers hope to have some room for autonomy on the insurance platform. Therefore, how to inject the concept of autonomy for consumers into the insurance platform is a main condition for the insurance industry to win today.
Particularly, in the age of the network economy, investment products are diversified, and time deposits of the entire banking industry largely flow towards various financial products such as stocks, funds, and bonds. As known from the variation of American IRA investment objective distribution proportion, the bank deposit accounts for 42% of the investment objective distribution proportion in 1990, which is reduced to 9% in ten years in 2000. On the life insurance market, according to the experience of other industrial countries, in people's financing funds, 25% is savings, 25% is invested on the common fund, and remaining less than 10% of the funds goes to the life insurance market. Therefore, how can the life insurance products strengthen the multi-function of the savings becomes the key for the life insurance industry to compete and win on the financial market.
U.S. Pat. Gazette No. 6,456,979, entitled “Method of Evaluating a Permanent Life Insurance Policy”, proposes to establish a basic insurance cost architecture and then adjust a premium of an individual insured according to various factors such as the gender and life form of the insured. US Patent Publication No. US2007005399, entitled “Method and Computer Program for Evaluating the Sustainability of a Permanent Life Insurance Policy” asks a proposer various questions through a system to assist the proposer in selecting the most appropriate insurance product. However, the two patents do not solve the problem that the whole life insurance product lacks the savings benefit.
Japanese Patent Publication No. JP2004062632, entitled “System, Method and Program for Processing Whole-life Insurance Change” and Japanese Patent Publication No. JP2003281372, entitled “Processing System for Shifting Insurance Contract to Whole-life Insurance, Insurance Contract Processing System, Processing Method for Shifting Insurance Contract to Whole-life Insurance, and Its Program” propose a system that enables an insured to shift an insurance contract to a whole life insurance policy and calculates relevant funds demands of the policy. However, they do not solve the fundamental problem that the whole life insurance lacks the savings benefit. The conventional whole life insurance product is a product of the age of the industrial economy, which lacks the information symmetry and has no room for autonomy of the consumers. Therefore, a financial insurance product reflecting the age of the network technology is expected not only by the insurance industry but also by the mass consumers.